Abstract
This chapter deals with the physics of neutrinos, which are neutral particles, partners of the charged leptons in SU(2) multiplets, subject to the weak interaction only—besides their negligible gravitational interaction. Due to their low interaction probability, they are very difficult to detect and as a consequence the neutrino sector is the least known in the standard model of particle physics. In the late 1990s it has been discovered that neutrinos of different flavors (electron, muon, or tau) “oscillate”: neutrinos created with well-defined leptonic flavor may be detected in another flavor eigenstate. This phenomenon implies that neutrinos have a non-zero—although tiny even for the standards of particle physics—mass.
This chapter deals with the physics of neutrinos, which are neutral particles, partners of the charged leptons in SU(2) multiplets, subject to the weak interaction only—besides their negligible gravitational interaction. Due to their low interaction probability, they are very difficult to detect and as a consequence the neutrino sector is the least known in the standard model of particle physics. In the late 1990s it has been discovered that neutrinos of different flavors (electron, muon, or tau) “oscillate”: neutrinos created with well-defined leptonic flavor may be detected in another flavor eigenstate. This phenomenon implies that neutrinos have a non-zero—although tiny even for the standards of particle physics—mass.
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Notes
- 1.
Frederick Reines (1918–1998) was a physicist from the USA, professor at the University of California at Irvine and formerly employed in the Manhattan project. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics 1995 “for pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics”; his compatriot and coworker Clyde Cowan Jr. (1919–1974) had already passed away at the time of the recognition.
- 2.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1988 was awarded jointly to Leon Lederman (New York 1922), Melvin Schwartz (New York 1931—Ketchum, Idaho, 2006) , and Jack Steinberger (Bad Kissingen 1921) “for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”
- 3.
The CNO cycle (for carbon–nitrogen–oxygen) is a set of alternative chains of conversion of hydrogen to helium. In the CNO cycle, four protons fuse, giving origin to one alpha particle, two positrons and two electron neutrinos; the cycle uses C, N, and O as catalysts. While the threshold of the pp-chain is around temperatures of 4 MK, the threshold of a self-sustained CNO chain is at approximately 15 MK. The CNO chain becomes dominant at 17 MK.
- 4.
The NuFIT group provides and regularly updates at the Web site http://www.nu-fit.org/ a global analysis of neutrino oscillation measurements.
- 5.
The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) was a 167-ton scintillation counter at Los Alamos National Laboratory that measured the flux of neutrinos produced by a near neutrino source, an accelerator beam dump.
- 6.
The Einstein–Podolski–Rosen (EPR) paradox originally involved two particles, A and B, which interact briefly and then move off in opposite directions. The two particles are then entangled, and any measurement on A (projection of A on an eigenstate) would have immediately implications on the state of B; this would violate locality. In the case of neutrinos, the neutrino wavefunction itself spreads during the travel, with possible nonlocal effects.
- 7.
Hereafter in this section the designations “left”- and “right-handed” refer to chirality and not to helicity. Note that for massive neutrinos chirality and helicity are not equivalent (see Chap. 6).
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De Angelis, A., Pimenta, M. (2018). The Properties of Neutrinos. In: Introduction to Particle and Astroparticle Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78181-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78181-5_9
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